One foot planted in “Yeehaw!” the other in “yuppie”.

  • 12 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I normally would, but my wife has the same problem and she’s done that 3 times in the last 6 months. In fact, her problem became MUCH worse because the “clean slate” was far more impressionable. She’d search up beauty routines, only to find that Youtube thinks she now wants to see “popping” videos, even though she’s now searching for dinner recipes.

    So yeah, I saw her experience and decided “no thanks”.

    To be fair, MOST of YouTube I watched can be found on Nebula and Floatplane, both of which will likely not have this issue since it’s not a user-content platform. Not to mention, the creators likely make more from those platforms anyways.

    YouTube is basically unavoidable though, so now I just view everything through a piped instance if I absolutely need something that can only be found there.


  • I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

    I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I’ve been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn’t seem to help at all.

    At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it’s recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

    I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn’t feel like I’m missing much.




  • yeah…

    They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn’t particularly mention privacy concerns.

    Other than that, if they don’t have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don’t require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.

    back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.

    I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it’s gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS’es). It’s surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it’s not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.

    But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.


  • I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

    I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

    Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.



  • The best “bang for the buck” in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

    As for your domain question:

    1. You should use any computer you’d like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any “funny business” stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

    2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won’t be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I’d recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

    3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don’t block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you’ll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that’s typical of DOCSIS modems won’t cut it. Outside of these concerns it’s all about making sure you isolate your server from your “home stuff” to keep things secure.



  • I mean sure maybe 10 years ago. But most static sites like blogs and such can fit entirely on a cloudflare page worker under the free tier. Or heck, even the free allotment on AWS S3 or other object storage providers.

    I mean, perhaps this isn’t a static site and it’s built on some sort of CMS and has a postgres database in the background. In that case it probably runs around $5 to $10 a month.

    Of course, this all presumes that the person setting this up is fairly savvy about the offerings available. I see a lot of people making silly decisions in this space, thinking that they need some full fat virtual private server, when all they really need is an object storage bucket behind a DNS c-name.


  • I guess I didn’t really see the pressure that they were under.

    I hope they heal! But it’s a bummer that such an excellent resource will be taken down.

    I wish more creators were willing to hand their creations to someone who wishes to continue it. But oftentimes, I fear that it’s far too entwined with a person’s identity for that to be common occurrence.




  • He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you’re working on. Unfortunately I don’t really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking “Oh my god, that would save me SO much time”.

    Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.




  • I’ll respectfully disagree if only because I had to nuke my beehaw account because apparently disagreeing that doxing extremists as an effective means of movement building or defense is tantamount to being a transphobe or Nazi sympathizer.

    They say “be nice”. But to me it seems like it’s just a type of mean that marginalized folks find acceptable or moral.

    My instance is still federated with them. But, I generally don’t participate anymore. Not like I used to.

    It’s a shame because in the early days I was helping them out with federation issues and a few other things on their discord. Spent many late nights helping Odo troubleshoot things.


  • I agree. My instance is locally focused so I can just ask rando’s off the street here in Tucson. Turns out people don’t like feeling controlled very much and want to be able to talk to friends that are on other platforms, and that’s why we won’t be defederating from meta/threads.

    I have a sense, though, that Blahaj is mostly not real people. Sometimes I wonder how easy it might be to give someone like Ada a false sense of support by loading up the instance with LLM bots that all act like Her. (It’s her, right? God please don’t dox me)

    Ive just grown skeptical that people actually operate like this in real life, or rather, enough people to actually matter. And that makes me further question the authenticity of entire instances like Beehaw or Blahaj as “lefty safe spaces”. Seems to me that they function more as a way to provide reasons to dismiss the progressive movement rather than join them.